A new name

He was not good at waiting. Things usually came at his call, or sometimes even anticipated his desires. It was incredible that he should suddenly find himself in such a maddening set of circumstances!

He still wore the great fur-lined overcoat in which he had arrived after the accident, but he seemed to be unaware of it as he paced excitedly up and down the stark leather-upholstered room.

Across the marble corridor he could just see the tip of white starched linen that was the cap of the uniformed person with double-lensed spectacles who sat at the roll-top desk and presided over this fiendish place.

Three times he had pranced pompously across the tessellated floor and demanded to know what had become of the patient he had brought in. She had only looked him over coldly, impersonally, and reiterated that word would be sent to him as soon as the examination was completed. Even his name, which he had condescendingly mentioned, had failed to make the slightest impression upon her. She had merely filed his immaculate calling card and remanded him to the reception-room.

The tall clock in the corner, the only live thing in the room, seemed to tick in eons, not seconds. He regarded it belligerently. Why should a clock seem to have eyes that searched to your soul? What was a clock doing there anyway, in a place where they regarded not time, and were absorbed in their own terrible affairs? The clock seemed to be the only connecting-link with the outside world.

He strode nearer and read the silver plate of the donor, inscribed in memory of “Elizabeth,” and turned sharply back to the door again with a haunting vision of the white-faced girl he had brought in a while before. Bessie! Little Bessie Chapparelle! She was “Elizabeth” too.

What a cute kid she was when he first knew her! Strange that on this day of all days he should have come upon her standing at that corner after all these years, suddenly grown up and stunningly handsome!

And now she lay crumpled, somewhere up in those distant marble halls!

He shuddered in his heavy coat and mopped the cold perspiration from his brows. If anything should happen to Bessie! And his fault! Everybody would of course say it was his fault! He knew he was a reckless driver. He knew he took chances, but he had always got by before! If she hadn’t been so darned pretty, so surprisingly sweet and unusual, and like the child she used to be--and that truck coming around the corner at thirty-five miles an hour!

The air was full of antiseptics. It seemed to him that he had been breathing it in until his head was swimming, that cold, pungent, penetrating smell that dwelt within those white marble walls like a living spirit of the dead!

Gad! What a place! Why did he stay? He could go home and telephone later. Nobody was compelling him to stay. Bessie was a poor girl with nobody to take her part. Nobody but her mother!

He halted in his excited walk. Her mother! If anything happened to Bessie somebody would have to tell her mother!

A door opened far in the upper marble regions, and the echo of a delirious cry shivered down through the corridors. Rubber wheels somewhere rolled a heavy object down a space and out of sound; voices rose in a subdued murmur as if they passed a certain point and drifted away from the main speech, drifted down the stairs, vague, detached words. Then all was still again.

Something dragged at his heart. He had thought they were coming, and now suddenly he was afraid to have them come. What a relief! Just a little longer respite till he could get hold of himself. He wasn’t at all fit, or things wouldn’t get hold of him this way. He had been going the pace pretty hard since he left college. Too many highballs! Too late at night!--Too many cigarettes! The old man was right! If he hadn’t been so infernally offensive in the way he put it! But one couldn’t of course go that pace forever and not feel it.